Outline. Transit. Kudos., National Theatre

Maverick director Katie Mitchell and pioneering playwright Alice Birch join forces to bring Rachel Cusk's celebrated trilogy of books to life on stage.

Drawing on Cusk's own experiences of motherhood and divorce, Outline. Transit. Kudos. follows Faye, a writer who is travelling around Europe teaching creative writing and then promoting her new book, before returning to London to confront her fractured family.

We learn about Faye's inner anxieties and urges through the conversations she has with those she meets. Cusk's characteristic intellectual and feminist concerns weave through the three stories, as Faye contends with her own sense of self and her role within the literary and academic worlds. As she prepares to returns to her children and ex-husband, Faye grapples with the conflict between leaving and remaining, as both a personal and a political choice.

Live film, audio and theatre will take audiences into Faye's psyche as Mitchell's multimedia stage adaptation of the three novels mirrors the uncensored lucidity of Cusk's prose. Having carved out a reputation for polarising productions, intense realism and distinctive styling, Mitchell is an illuminating match for the audacious honesty of Rachel Cusk's writing. Mitchell was last at the National Theatre directing a revival of Sarah Kane's Cleansed in 2016, and she has previously worked with writer Alice Birch (We Want You to Watch, Little Light) in an experiment study of female trauma, Anatomy of a Suicide (Royal Court, 2017).

Outline. Transit. Kudos. will premiere at the National's Lyttelton Theatre from October 2020. Tickets will go on sale later this year.